“In this section we review all works presented to the library of ‘The Woman's Voice.’”
I am sorry that the special issue which “The Woman's Voice” brought out for Christmas and the New Year prevented me from reviewing for you, Madam, some of the books that have been presented to my library. In my library this time are new works worthy to be counted among the books you read and with which you adorn your desk. The first of these works is “Thick Lips” by Mr. Mahmoud Taymour. Number of pages: 126. Publisher: al-Istiqama Press, Cairo.
Readers of fiction in the Arab countries have known Mahmoud Taymour as a masterly storyteller and a novelist of the first order, whose like our modern Arabic literature has not met. This is a truth known to everyone who has followed Taymour in his various works of fiction. He has written some twenty-five books of stories which count, rightly, as a vast literary fortune in our modern Arabic letters.
This collection is made up of several short stories, among them: The Stray Kiss, The Milaya of Love, Rulers from Heaven, The Saint of God, Asaad Bey's Dog, The Kiss on the Leg, Abu Ali and the Bottle of Cognac, The Fifth Column, The Substitute, and Thick Lips — the most important of them, in my view, and the crown of the whole collection.
Space does not allow a criticism of these tales tale by tale and a display of the points of beauty in them, but I must draw the readers' attention to the story “Thick Lips,” for in it appears the greatest of Taymour's storytelling merits: precise sensory description. So that the reader may glimpse something of this description, I content myself with citing a few of the author's phrases in describing the lips of the story's heroine.
Hear him say, on the tongue of the story's hero, after he had come upon the owner of the lips in one of the banks, where she bumped into him twice, and he meant to protest at her behavior but found himself walking beside her in the same direction:
“And I found myself walking with her in one direction along the road. She was a brunette with a certain
comeliness, wearing a modest dress whose look did not bespeak easy means, though it kept a shade of elegance and sound taste... Nothing set her apart from her likes, whom the passer-by meets of a morning and an evening, save one particular feature: her lips!.. Yes, her lips — the very crux of her... They were two thick lips which I never saw closed for a moment, but forever parted, allowing a white gleam of teeth to show forth its sparkle and its symmetry... And when you look at the upper lip, you notice at once that it seems always to be trying to draw itself away from its companion in pride and disdain; and this disdain and pride have gathered themselves into a protrusion at its center — a protrusion resembling, in many respects, the nipple of a breast, attracting you by its artistic formation and compelling you to gaze at it without end...”
“And each of us looked at the other; then we let ourselves go in a ‘loud’ burst of laughter, during which I found myself gazing at her two thick lips as they clashed and jostled, and watching with eager delight that lovely protrusion, until I wished her laugh might last a while longer...”
Their talk ran on, and he began conversing with her “his eyes never leaving her lips.” And the owner of the thick lips was nothing but a thief, who robbed him of his wallet and left him alone in the café. Yet in spite of that he could not — when his eye fell, in a magazine holding a contest for lips, upon a “thick” mouth with parted lips, a noticeable
protrusion in the middle of the upper one — help cutting out the picture of that mouth and putting it in a dictionary on his desk. And often he found himself driven, in spite of himself, to open the dictionary and gaze long at those thick lips — those lips which he did not scruple to describe with the ugliest epithets and the coarsest terms: “Your lips?... Ha! Ha!... Your thick, swollen lips, drooping like the lips of the ugliest Negroes...?”
As for these lips, and their effect on our friend the lawyer, the hero of the tale, and the end to which they brought him — of that, Madam, I shall tell you nothing, for fear of robbing you of the pleasure of reading it complete in the book. And the book holds a number of tales that deserve to be read with pleasure and eagerness.
In my library, Madam, is another handsome book by Mr. Taymour: “Eternal Eve,” a play whose two protagonists, Antara and Abla, are two great figures out of ancient Arab history. In this play the author has not followed the familiar historical course of the story of Antara and Abla, nor has he bound himself to the facts which the historical sources give of these two heroes; rather he has drawn Abla for us as a modern girl — gay, seductive, alluring — who tries, despite all the love and admiration she harbors for her beloved Antara, to show him the opposite of what she hides within.
She is a lover of fame: she never ceases to demand that her name “fill the world and occupy mankind.” And she feigns love for the Emir Umara, Antara's adversary and his rival for the heart of his beloved — and that only to deepen the vexation of this beloved. And she toys with the hearts of young men, although she has reached the age of marriage, and despite her intense admiration for that dark young man. When Hind, one of her companions, accuses her of contending with their friend Daja' for the heart of the Emir Umara, Abla answers her: “I have robbed no one and contended with no one!... It was Antara who came to me,”